62 : The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections In Germany, France, Italy, and France, publishers strongly defend the calculation of ebook prices in rela- tion to print as the most relevant benchmark, and under this arrangement, ebooks come at a discount of an average 10 to 20 percent, with a trend closer to the 20 percent discount. This status quo still mirrors a largely traditional con- cept of publishers marketing (electronic as well as print) books as well as setting the price and readers purchasing ebooks from sources and in a context similar to the traditional book market. Yet this context of book selling is facing serious change. As ebooks travel more easily, across markets and even linguistic borders—as will be highlighted shortly— and because early adopters of ebooks are conceivably strong and well-educated readers who are ready to embrace books in languages other than their native language, international price comparisons for ebooks will become more and more relevant as benchmarks. The entrance (or expansion) of global players such as Amazon, Apple, Google, or Kobo into the ebook arena has highlighted tax regimes within the European Union, bringing the European headquarters of most companies, with the exception of Google, to act out of Luxembourg, and resulting in this small harbor of lowering tax on ebooks to a competitive 4 percent. But even beyond such legal and tax issues, Europe is a highly fragmented continent when it comes to ebooks, and especially with regard to pricing. A comparison of actual consumer prices for top selling ction titles of September 2012, in print and ebook (or more precisely: Kindle) editions, with selected comparisons between 2012 and 2011, shows a stagger- ingly diverse landscape. The table and the chart show how widely prices vary across Europe and the US on all levels, for the printed editions, for the discount of digital (Kindle) editions against print, and of pricing regimes and strategies among European countries. license. This di erence results in signi cant surcharges for ebooks and discrimination of ebooks versus printed books. A complex discussion is currently taking place among both national trade associations as well as the Federation of European Publishers (FEP), with publishers arguing in favor of extending reduced VAT rates to ebooks, notably to “ensure that professional published content, regardless of its format or method of access, receives a scal treatment that recognizes its contribu- tion to a wide range of goals in social, cultural, and economic terms” (reply by FEP to a Green Paper of the European Commission on VAT, May 2011). In France, new legislation was introduced, e ective January 1, 2012, to both include ebooks under the xed price regulation and to apply reduced VAT rates to ebooks, with the latter application resulting in an instant reaction from the European Commission, which investi- gates whether such legislation is compliant with European law. (For details, see the earlier discussion on France.) Especially in France and Germany, publishers’ associa- tions (SNE and Börsenverein), authors’ representatives, and individual publishers (Hachette, Gallimard, La Martinière, and others) have actively participated in legal actions in New York against Google’s digitization of copyrighted books and the proposed “Google settle- ment,” which captured the attention of both the media and the interested (professional) audience as well as politicians, to the point of the con ict of the “book pro- fessionals” versus Google being broadly identi ed with the broader topic of emerging ebooks. Most of these legal battles have since been settled. The next frontier in the battle over change is pricing, as well as amendments to copyright legislation. Pricing Strategies for eBooks How much should an ebook cost? Due to the prevalence of xed prices in most of continental Europe (with Sweden as an exception), publishers usually set the retail price, and competition in books is not driven by pricing.